MIA > Archive > Hyndman > Adventurous Life
At any rate my year in Italy in nowise influenced me in the direction of a staid legal life on getting back to London. Mine was a sort of drifting existence, common to not a few men of my age, between the Temple and journalism, society and literature, whist at the Clubs, cricket and billiards. But about this time there was a spasm of poverty, exceptional even for the poverty-stricken East End of London, which awakened a responsive tremor of fitful sympathy among the well-to-do. This sort of thing comes at intervals. Suddenly the West End of London, the fashionable dwellers in Belgravia and Bayswater, Mayfair and South Kensington, awakened to the fact that there were some 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 people in the brick and mortar wilderness beyond the Bank of England, many of them in very woeful distress. It became quite the proper thing to go down East. Guardsmen and girls of the period, rich philanthropists and prophets of Piccadilly, students of human nature and cynics on the make, betook themselves with hearts and pockets bursting with charity to the choicest rookeries to be found along the riverside.
My Lady Bountiful could be seen picking her way through some unsavoury slum in the neighbourhood of Limehouse, chance encounters of high-born personages were frequent in the Ratcliff Highway, and more deliberate assignations were commonly made in the Poplar alleys. Many a marriage in high life was the outcome of these exciting excursions into the unknown haunts of the poor. When the excitement was over and the interest flagged, when benevolence became rather a bore and charity too expensive, our exquisites returned with their carriages and their footmen and things went on as before, till ten or fifteen years later the whole unseemly farce is enacted over again. My friend of Trinity, Raymond Lluellyn, was swept along in this direction by a feeling of genuine sympathy and persuaded me to go with him.
I was then an out-and-out Radical, believing that if all the people only had the vote and a good secular education they would soon put a new and better face upon the world. In fact my Radicalism, tempered with a certain appreciation of the good things of this world, and a knowledge of how to get and use them, was regarded by my friends as only skin-deep. But a Radical I was, nevertheless, and I would gladly have run some risks in order to obtain speedily political reforms which we have not yet got more than forty years later. So I went with Lluellyn and saw the poverty-and-crime-defaced portions of our metropolis thoroughly – so thoroughly that I have never needed or wished to see them again. I know they exist, I have sounded the very depth of them, and that is enough. Yet I am bound to admit that, though horrified and commiserating, I took the whole of these dreadful conditions, the dirt, the squalor, the degradation, the raggedness, the nakedness, the servility and the ruffianism to be inevitable: a state of things to be alleviated but which could never be wholly done away with. After a few weeks of actual experience, however, I felt that Lluellyn and myself might well be classed as triflers too, and I understood a little the sensation of hatred which some of the miserable felt when they saw these well-dressed, well-fed philanderers from afar coming down with airs of superiority to pry into their wretchedness. Possibly, the remembrance of these horrors of peace, so much more dreadful to me than even the horrors of war, had its effect in turning my mind to Socialism later.
The boom in slumming, however, soon died down: the victims of society were left once more to wallow in their starvation and misery uncared for. Lluellyn, my companion on this trip to the East, was one of my closest friends. We had travelled together, amused ourselves together, backed one another’s bills together, and shared one another’s good luck together. Somehow, later, he fell into a deep depression, from no cause whatever that I could discover. I tried hard to rouse him up, persuaded him to come away for a few days, twitted him with being in love – all to no purpose, his despondency only increased. One fine day he came to see me looking deplorably ill, indeed, as I thought, like to die. I asked him what was the matter with him and pressed him to tell me all about himself, for I felt deeply concerned. At last it came out that he had tried to commit suicide with laudanum, had taken an overdose and woke up many hours later, much to his surprise, with a frightful headache and looking the physical wreck I saw. I only recall this incident now because Lluellyn married later a rich wife who was devoted to him, was exceedingly happy, took to politics and became Tory candidate for a London constituency and only died, more than fifteen years afterwards, because he would be too polite to a Duke who had taken the chair for him at a crowded meeting and, driving home on the box of his brougham, caught cold in the kidneys and left his seat to be won by Sir Albert Rollit – which was a great misfortune for his party. I have only known two men in my life who committed suicide at the right time and comfortably. Why it should be regarded as cowardly to join the majority when and how it may suit your own convenience I have never yet been able to understand.
I have never been of those who hold that what is called “capital punishment” should be done away with, and it has always seemed to me one of the most remarkable instances of the illogicality of the human mind on such matters that desperate Anarchists, who are certainly no respecters of human life in their “propaganda of deed” against obnoxious individuals or classes, should be even more zealous than the extremest of humanitarians in their anxiety to preserve the lives of common non-political murderers. The argument that it is expedient that one man, or a great many men, should die for the people seems to them all-sufficient when brought forward in support of their own methods of spreading the light by putting out of existence few or many harmful humans ; but that really dangerous ruffians, with obviously anti-social tendencies, should be deprived, in the most effectual manner possible, of the opportunity for “removing” any more of their species, in order to gratify their lusts or to indulge their greed for gain, is, according to these sentimental disputants, a far worse crime on the part of society towards them than any that either criminals or anarchists can be guilty of towards society.
This, I say, is a view I never could adopt. If a man or a woman is a deliberate murderer, either by direct violence or by poison, I see no earthly reason why other persons, who have no such blots on their record, should be compelled to provide these criminals with the means of living; why, moreover, other equally innocent human beings should be condemned for many years to watch over and attend to such obnoxious outcomes of our civilised life; nor why, lastly, society as a whole should run the risk of such criminals escaping from custody and then having another innings at homicide or take to reproducing their own objectionable types of humanity. “Stone dead hath no fellow” for dealing with cases of this kind. A few years will see the end of them anyhow. Why wait and see?
And I am quite prepared to extend this reasoning even farther and to protest against the keeping alive of criminal lunatics. Why should they inflict themselves upon the sane, when they have already proved that they are a danger to society? A comfortable introduction into nothingness, unexpected and therefore unfeared, can surely not be reckoned as “capital punishment.” It is merely, as Lord Bacon puts it, “a laudable method of procuring an easy death”; anticipating a later and probably less agreeable departure by a few years.
These reflections forced themselves very strongly on my mind when I was staying with my old fellow pupil J.F. Maurice, then a Captain of Artillery and Professor at Sandhurst. We had gone out for a long walk over the splendid commons and through the beautiful pine woods which stretch around Farnborough, when we came upon a warder, walking slowly and weakly along, his shoulders covered with blood. It was evident from his dress he came from the Broadmoor Asylum for criminal lunatics, which was situated not far off. We asked him what was the matter, who had done him this terrible injury, and offered to help him along. He refused assistance but told us that his hurt was due to “that scoundrel Bisgrove” with whom he had been out for a walk. When the warder was stooping down looking into a rabbit-hole, into which a rabbit had just disappeared, Bisgrove came behind him and hit him a tremendous blow with a stone on the back of the head, stunning him and causing great effusion of blood. Bisgrove then made off, leaving the unfortunate warder for dead.
We went with the injured man, and getting some other people from the neighbourhood we searched the surrounding woods and commons for the escaped murderer. It appeared that this man Bisgrove had killed a fellow agricultural-labourer in precisely the same way, and having been found guilty was adjudged on the ground of insanity to be imprisoned for life. At Broadmoor he was thought to be quite a reasonable sort of person and was allowed to go out walking frequently, accompanied by a warder. In this way he got the opportunity of which he took such a cowardly advantage. After a long and vain attempt to trace the assailant Maurice and I returned to his house, feeling confident that with the country for miles round roused up to track and capture Bisgrove, and with the police active on his trail, we should soon hear he had been taken and returned to prison. As we were sitting at dinner, however, we had an unpleasant surprise. A note was brought in to my friend and host, to the following effect: – “My dear Maurice. Keep your weather eye lifting. That scoundrel Bisgrove was seen to get over into your garden half an hour ago,” signed by a colonel living in the same terrace. Up jumped Maurice with even more than military alacrity. “We’ll go out,” quoth he, “and catch the fellow.”
It was now full dusk deepening into pitch dark, and I could have imagined a much pleasanter aid to digestion than an expedition of two uneasy gentlemen in dress clothes groping around for a murdering lunatic amid shrubs and trees and hedges, from which at any moment the miscreant might sally forth and attack us. But I could not show disinclination or venture upon remonstrance with Maurice so hot upon the trail. Out I went too, therefore, and for a good half hour stumbled about in the gloom, expecting every moment, if I escaped a battering on the head with a heavy stone, to be sharply engaged in a tussle for life with a madman. Happily – I say it deliberately – happily, neither of us encountered the fellow, and after about half an hour of this amusement we returned to the dinner-table and drank confusion to criminal lunatics in general and to Bisgrove in particular. The man has never been heard of from that day to this; but for years after this incident, when I heard of some inexplicable and undiscovered crime of violence, I have wondered whether Bisgrove might not have had a hand in it. But again I ask why should we run the risk of having such a person let loose upon us in the name of pseudo-philanthropy? What on earth is gained by it?
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Last updated on 30.7.2006